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Hitching an Old-Fashioned Ride the Newfangled Way

Nick KurczewskiThe 1930 Reo Flying Cloud in which the author was shuttled through Midtown on Friday.

To promote the season premiere of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” a fleet of a dozen town cars spent two days transporting fares to their destination in Manhattan. The third season of the Emmy-winning show, chronicling Prohibition-era Atlantic City, N.J., begins Sept. 16.

Nabbing a ride in the cars was accomplished solely by using a taxi-hailing smartphone app produced by Uber, which is designed to connect passengers with available yellow cabs. The connection to the GPS-enabled technology seemed an incongruous association for a promotion otherwise steeped in a time when Babe Ruth was building his house in the Bronx, a subway ride cost a nickel and the 21 Club was one of best speakeasies in town. The legality of the app has also been brought into question by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.

For all that, however, the promotion, which ran on Thursday and Friday, garnered plenty of interest — and how could it not, with an imposing 1928 Packard and a original 1928 Hupmobile sedan involved? The Packard seemed to occupy half a city block on West 24th Street, waiting for its first passengers on Friday morning. To keep the cars’ workload manageable, rides were limited to the borough of Manhattan, from Canal Street to 57th Street.

Nick KurczewskiRobert Braren, a chauffeur during the promotion, with the 1928 Hupmobile.

My temporary chauffeur was Ron Griffith, a retired New York City police officer, behind the wheel of a white 1930 Reo Flying Cloud. Riding on its original 82-year-old wooden wheels fashioned from solid oak, this particular Reo had appeared in films like “Annie” and Francis Ford Coppola′s “The Cotton Club.” The car’s original powertrain has long since given way to a Chevrolet V-8 engine and automatic transmission, Mr. Griffith said. A dash-mounted GPS unit and rear-facing iPad, running a loop of “Boardwalk Empire” promos, were presumably not on the sedan’s original order sheet.

Rose Esposito hailed the Reo using her mobile phone outside her workplace, which, fittingly, was in the Paley Center for Media, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio. Mr. Griffith opened the rear door for her. As she settled into the springy, sofalike rear seat, Mr. Griffith inquired, in a thick Brooklyn accent: “So, if you were gonna get whacked, where would you want to get whacked?”

The Reo made a similarly oversize impression as it cruised down Fifth Avenue. Passers-by scrambled to shoot photos with their mobile phones. “Go ‘Boardwalk Empire!'” one woman shouted from the sidewalk, giving a thumbs-up salute. “What happens in the new season? Is it going to be good?” a taxi driver, stopped at a red light, asked Mr. Griffith.

The show has a short but colorful promotional history in the city. Last year, ahead of the series premiere of the second season, period-correct subway cars, the earliest dating to 1917, ran on a limited stretch of the 2/3 line in Manhattan for four weekends in September. The promotion was financed by HBO, and had the cooperation of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the New York Transit Museum, in downtown Brooklyn.

“With a show like ‘Boardwalk Empire,’ we have the opportunity to leverage icons from the time period to create an authentic way for consumers to interact with our promotions,” Zach Enterlin, senior vice president of HBO’s program advertising, said.

Having taken a ride on the 2/3 line last year, Ms. Esposito confessed to being a “fan girl” of the series. Earlier this summer, she had come into possession of a ticket to an advance screening of the premiere episode, held at the Ziegfeld Theater, where she also met the cast. “It was kind of the best day of my life,” she said.

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